'Strange Attractors' is lesser 'Doll's House'

There are several dollhouses in David Adjmi's new black comedy, "Strange Attractors."

One is the set, a nifty, butter-yellow rowhouse designed by Matt Smucker, which opens on hinges to reveal a New York living room painted in chic shades of lavender and avocado.

The second dollhouse is a toy, a pastel mini-palace built for a vast collection of Barbies.

And then there is "A Doll's House," Henrik Ibsen's pivotal play about a woman's evolution from dutiful Victorian trophy wife to independent female.

From Ibsen, Adjmi borrows a basic plot scheme and character design. But where the earlier drama evokes some change and compassion, especially in the conflicted figure of Nora, "Strange Attractors" settles for laughs and loathing — more of the latter than the former by the time the 90-minute one-act runs out of satirical octane and sputters along on fumes.

Let it be said that the piece gets a crisp staging, with clever garnishes, from director Chay Yew. And the four-member cast, especially Heidi Schreck and Shelley Reynolds, tries hard to locate human beings within the gargoyle roles.

Schreck handily plays Betsy, a yuppie New York housewife with a severe case of the ditzes, brought on by insecurity, anxiety — and a secret yen for sadomasochistic sex.

Dressed in the kind of '50s-style frocks Julianne Moore sports in the film "Far From Heaven," Betsy is a '90s model of an airhead, chatterbox, early sit-com wife — Gracie Allen, with a dash of Martha Stewart and a streak of Catherine Deneuve in Buñuel's "Belle de Jour." (The text's pop and literary references are abundant, and not inscrutable.)

Betsy is married to a lumpish MTV exec, Josh (Ian Bell), who gets ticked off when his wife maxes out the household credit cards for Christmas. But fundamentally, he accepts her live-to-shop lifestyle and loopy chatter. And if Betsy has an S&M fetish, Josh has some hidden quirks himself — one that catches up with him by the play's end.

Like Ibsen's Nora, Betsy rekindles a friendship with an old school chum. That's Vanna, a mass of seething neuroses and New York chutzpah, played to the hilt by Reynolds with a rich vocabulary of scowls and grimaces.

Also like Nora, Betsy is being blackmailed by a former co-worker of her hubby's: the gloomy shlub Alexander (Duke Novak) who has a few perverse kinks in his own leather-jacketed armor.

Adjmi has a gift for zig-zaggy monologue — dialogues that express how narcissistic these consumer-age folks are, how addicted to psychobabble, how shallow their personal connections and political commitments. (Even if they do dress up as giant red ribbons for a World AIDS Day rally.).

But while Schreck brings shades of vulnerability and longing to Betsy's dilettantism and cluelessness, it's hard to care much what becomes of her — or anyone else in "Strange Attractors." Because not much does.

The vacuity, hypocrisy and tiny attention span of certain brittle young urbanites alone isn't big news. At times, most acutely in a painful scene of marital confession sharply lit by Patti West, it seems the play might swerve into more insightful and complex terrain.

But soon the perky Muzak starts up again, the stagehands undress and re-dress Betsy-the-human-Barbie (a recurring bit), and "Strange Attractors" reverts to an ironic-absurdist still-life, flecked with mordant laughs.

Since the comic-tragic equation is off, maybe stagnation is Adjmi's main point. For in the end, Ibsen's Nora chose to leave home and slam the door behind her. Betsy just locks herself in.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com.